A finFET is a transistor built around a thin strip of semiconductor material (generally referred to as the fin). The transistor includes the standard field-effect transistor (FET) nodes, including a gate, a gate dielectric, a source region, and a drain region. The conductive channel of the device resides on the outer sides of the fin beneath the gate dielectric. Specifically, current runs along/within both sidewalls of the fin (sides perpendicular to the substrate surface) as well as along the top of the fin (side parallel to the substrate surface). Because the conductive channel of such configurations essentially resides along the three different outer, planar regions of the fin, such a finFET design is sometimes referred to as a tri-gate transistor. The finFET is an example of a non-planar transistor configuration. Other types of non-planar configurations are also available, such as: so-called double-gate finFETs, in which the conductive channel principally resides only along the two sidewalls of the fin (and not along the top of the fin); vertical channel FETs, in which vertical fins or wires include a gate separating the source and drain; and nanowire or nanoribbon FETs, in which the gate is all around one or more conductive channels. There exists a number of non-trivial issues associated with non-planar transistors.